Bob Browning's blog

A designer who we had done work for just sent me a contract their client had sent them to sign. It was headed ‘Assignment of Intellectual Property(IP) Rights’. It would assign all IP rights in the software to the client.

I had to check the date on the email but it was April 3rd not the 1st. We use the identical software on all our client’s sites, so the whole idea of giving the IP rights to one of them is a total non-starter. We would be out of business.

We include on all our quotations a para that summarises our terms and conditions which includes a link to our standard licence on our web site. The licence is pretty standard, in fact rather less restrictive than an open source licence. The client has the right to use, copy and modify the software as they see fit. The only real restriction is that they can’t go into business selling my software.

So why would they want the IP transferred?

I suspect some lawyer saw a chance to earn some fees. Or some manager somewhere, who didn’t bother to ask some basic questions, had the idea that a really serious content management system had been written for them from scratch (in a month and a half – some chance!) and as they had paid for it they should own it. Now the Designer is going to have some difficult conversations with the client.

This could all have been avoided if designers who resell our CMS had terms and conditions which mirrored our own. All I have to is figure out how to persuade them to do it.